2 Control and Subversion in Russian Cyberspace
Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski
Introduction
It has become a truism to link censorship in cyberspace to the practices of authoritarian regimes. Around the world, the most repressive governments—China, Burma,
North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia—are the ones that erect digital firewalls that restrict
citizens’ access to information, filter political content, and stymie freedom of speech
online. When we turn to the countries of the former Soviet Union—Russia and the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—we should expect no different. The Economist index of democracy paints a bleak picture of political freedoms in the CIS (see
Table 2.1; numbers represent the country’s rank in the world). 1 Only two countries,
Ukraine and Moldova, rank as flawed democracies, with the remaining 10 countries of
the region described as either hybrid regimes or authoritarian.
Throughout the CIS, this creeping authoritarianism is evident in just about every
facet of social and political life. Independent media are stifled, journalists intimidated,
and opposition parties and civil society groups harassed and subject to a variety of suffocating regulations. And yet, in spite of this increasingly constrained environment,
the Internet remains accessible and relatively free from filtering. The ONI has tested
extensively through the CIS region, far deeper and more regularly in fact than in any
other region in the world. To date we have documented traditional ‘‘Chinese-style’’
Internet filtering—the deliberate and static blocking of Internet content and services
by state sanction—only in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. For the rest of the region,
while connectivity may be poor and unreliable, and suffer from the usual rent-seeking
distortions found in other developing country environments, the same basic content is
available there as in the most open country contexts.
In our chapter, we explore this seeming disjuncture between authoritarianism in the
CIS and the relative freedom enjoyed in Russian cyberspace, commonly known as
RUNET. We argue that attempts to regulate and impose controls over cyberspace in
the CIS are not necessarily absent (as ONI testing results may suggest) but are different
than in other regions of the world. We hypothesize that CIS control strategies have
Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski
Introduction
It has become a truism to link censorship in cyberspace to the practices of authoritarian regimes. Around the world, the most repressive governments—China, Burma,
North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia—are the ones that erect digital firewalls that restrict
citizens’ access to information, filter political content, and stymie freedom of speech
online. When we turn to the countries of the former Soviet Union—Russia and the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—we should expect no different. The Economist index of democracy paints a bleak picture of political freedoms in the CIS (see
Table 2.1; numbers represent the country’s rank in the world). 1 Only two countries,
Ukraine and Moldova, rank as flawed democracies, with the remaining 10 countries of
the region described as either hybrid regimes or authoritarian.
Throughout the CIS, this creeping authoritarianism is evident in just about every
facet of social and political life. Independent media are stifled, journalists intimidated,
and opposition parties and civil society groups harassed and subject to a variety of suffocating regulations. And yet, in spite of this increasingly constrained environment,
the Internet remains accessible and relatively free from filtering. The ONI has tested
extensively through the CIS region, far deeper and more regularly in fact than in any
other region in the world. To date we have documented traditional ‘‘Chinese-style’’
Internet filtering—the deliberate and static blocking of Internet content and services
by state sanction—only in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. For the rest of the region,
while connectivity may be poor and unreliable, and suffer from the usual rent-seeking
distortions found in other developing country environments, the same basic content is
available there as in the most open country contexts.
In our chapter, we explore this seeming disjuncture between authoritarianism in the
CIS and the relative freedom enjoyed in Russian cyberspace, commonly known as
RUNET. We argue that attempts to regulate and impose controls over cyberspace in
the CIS are not necessarily absent (as ONI testing results may suggest) but are different
than in other regions of the world. We hypothesize that CIS control strategies have